Well, it claims to work because of the evidence that it happens. To quote from one of their pages.

The observed effects are usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they are statistically repeatable
and compound to highly significant deviations from chance expectations.

I imagine what you're really interested in is why it does work, which is (at this point) as much a theological question as anything
else. It's complicated by the fact that such things can actually have an effect in reverse time. That is, you can theoretically effect
an outcome that happened yesterday by thinking about it strongly enough today.

It ties into all sorts of basic scientific assumptions, like the nature of causality, the subject/object dichotomy, etc.

The SAM system S-300 (NATO codename SA-11, I think...)
is controlled by a computer called "5Ya-26", with
the assembly done entirely in Russian. Some of
instruction mnemonics there have interesting connotations. ;-)

has anyone here built a large site using a common lisp httpd
rather
than, say, some zope or php thing? did it work out well?

ww.telent.net runs on Araneida, which is at least a common
lisp httpd - but not the one you have a link to there. Seems to work,
but I'm unconvinced as to how effective it is when hit with slow
connections and/or multiple connections, so I put an apache in front
of it to shield it from the big bad internet. When I get around to
writing the date parsing stuff I can make it respond appropriately to
conditional GETs too, then the proxy can cache properly.

has anyone had any experience with free radio FM microbroadcasting?

Cripes! 50 watts is "low power"? <yorkshireman number="4">
When I were a lad we had a tenth of that, and we were grateful for it
</yorkshireman>. Ahem. So I hear. I have never ever done anything
illegal, and certainly I would never be posting about it on Advogato if
I had.

It's complicated by the fact that such things can actually have an
effect in reverse time. That is, you can theoretically effect an outcome
that happened yesterday by thinking about it strongly enough today.

not so hasty: there are some serious problems with this. Assuming it was
true, i.e. we were indeed able to modify yesterdays happenings by todays
thought (however small), isn't this per se completely incompatible with
the very basics of the 'scientific approach', inclusively what we call
an 'experiment' ?
The problem seems a vicious circle, to be 'provable' by any modern
definition of the term, something has to have some very basic properties
such as observable, repeatable etc. Think of a typical
experiment: you set up a controlled environment, inclusively all the
measuring devices, then you start the experiment. Now in your
case above: you choose an effect, wait a couple of days, then you
prepare the environment to match the effect you observed.

No, I'm not trying to mock any attempt to find violations of
causality.
But you have to find a coherent approach to attack the problem, don't
try to fit a square into a round hole.

And to it's relation to theology: there can't be any. Theology, by
definition is a disjunct domain to science. There were a couple of
attempts to prove or disprove god. People still don't understand that
anything provable by definition is objective, so if god ends up
being proven, it isn't the same god any more christian theology is
speaking about.

First, you should read "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt" by Joan Vinge. One of the societies portrayed in the book is the Demarchy, a
nightmarish dystopia where citizens vote on individual issues moment-by-moment. In this society, there is no reasoned discourse, no
contemplation or reflection on the issues - whatever the mob's passion is at that moment, that's the law of the land. The leaders are little
more than glitzy tabloid salesmen, pandering to the whims of the moment.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America points out a similar phenomena. At that time (shortly before the civil
war I think), the U.S. Senate was elected by the state legislatures, rather than by the populace. His comment was that when you went
into the Senate, it was populated with famous writers, generals, historians; While at the same time the House, which was elected by the
people, was filled with vulgar nobodies, opportunists, that sort of thing.

I highly recommend de Tocqueville, I really think of it as basic political science for hackers. Many of the problems we face on the
'net today (such as Tyranny of the Majority in moderated discussion groups), were first identified by de Tocqueville. (Although clearly we
know better about many things today - his argument about American Indians not being
farmers was way off base.)

I think that the ancient Greeks may also have experimented with this, although a lot of their experiments ended in failure

Note that the U.S. wasn't the first attempt at a federated republic, although all of the earlier attempts also failed as far as I know.

The lesson that I take from all this: Creating a stable political system is hard, and no-one really knows how to do it yet.

does digital watermarking work in any reliable way when you resample
a watermarked signal. if so, how?

The answer to this is generally no. Most digital
watermarks
are kept within the file (ie: in the high bits of an image). Although
it is possible
to mark an image so that certain colour indexes (ie: colour 2345 which
might be
blue or red or purple at the time), create the water mark.

Reason this will break in resampling is that high-order bits are
often lost (or
may vanish on file-type conversion). And certain colour indexes will be
lost between
conversions/sampling.

are there sufficient species of edible perennials or permacultural
plants that we can shift to less destructive agriculture? and if
so, what is holding us back?

Yes there are. There are hundreds of plant types we could grow in a
permaculture
system that would not only be less destructive, would start repairing
the damage we
have done.

Why don't we use them? Industry marketing. To use these food stuffs
properly we
would have to have ungenetically modified versions (which exist). The
plant industry
does not want us to use them, cause they can't make a sustained profit
off them.
Plants produce seeds, seeds can be given to your friends (Yes,
open source exists in the food industry).

The only other reason why we don't use sustainable food culture is
that culturally
we expect certain food types and expect to be provided with food from
shops.
Personally, my household grows most of our food, but its a
lot of
effort, and takes a fair bit of space (we have 8 members of the
household).

stefan: The point that i was trying to make when using the word "theological" was
that the results are entering realms that traditional science is incapable of dealing with, since traditional science relies on things like the
subject/object dichotomy and the ever-forward direction of cause-effect reactions.

Assuming it was true, i.e. we were indeed able to modify yesterdays happenings by todays thought (however small), isn't this per se
completely incompatible with the very basics of the 'scientific approach', inclusively what we call an 'experiment' ?

Yes, it is incompatible. Which is what makes it so fascinating (to me). The notion of science being used to find fundamental
shortcomings
in science is certainly not without irony.

you choose an effect, wait a couple of days, then you prepare the environment to match the effect you observed.

Well, in the experiments that i read about (from Colgate, i think, though it's been a few years), they were a bit better about it than that.
The experiments were based around a mechanical device which would generate (unattended) an even distribution of ones and zeroes.
They would ask a subject to influence the outcome in a given direction ("Subject A, please make the machine make ones."), and observe
the results. When they actually came to the point where they were considering reverse causality (or whatever you want to call it), they
would run the machine for the appointed amount of time, sealing the results without viewing them. Then, a day later, "Subject A, please
make the machine make ones yesterday." Only once that process was complete would they actually view the results (very
Schrodingerian) and determine whether influence was exerted.

When i read:

These anomalies can be demonstrated with the operators located up to thousands of miles from the laboratory, exerting their efforts
hours before or after the actual operation of the devices. (ibid)

i assumed that the Princeton research had encountered similar phenomena. Perhaps i'm reading too much into that. Or perhaps my
belief
that they may have encountered those phenomena is actually somehow increasing the probability that they did. :-)

There's other Russian programming languages, other then what Zaitcev
have mentioned. Iskra, a C-64 like personal computer for example,
utilized a BASIC language, which was not only controlled in Russian, but
also utilized the Cyrillic Alphabet. I have a 1989 book on Computer
Gaming, somewhere on my book shelf, in Russian. It lists a lot of code
in the language.

How does this work? Generally, it doesn't. Their
"small but real" effects are misapplications of statistics, or wishfully
low acceptance thresholds. Mulder's poster. To be fair, I didn't read
their publications, but I didn't see a wealth of peer-review papers
(there have been some) and I've read books by similar outfits in the
past.

If it does work as claimed, it's almost certainly through new
physics. Certainly the
smart and famous Roger Penrose is thoroughly convinced that
consciousness (or more properly, the part of human consciousness that
identifies mathematical truth) can't be explained in terms deterministic
physics. (And he's also been roundly
criticized for it.)

Other chinks suggest themselves. There's the anomalous
acceleration of the Pioneer space probes. The persistent rumours of
a
fifth
force. If you like extrapolation by analogy, the anomalous precession of
Mercury's perihelion was a major factor pointing to problems with
newtonian
mechanics and one of the first experimental verifications of general
relativity. I've never heard a
convincing explaination of what happens when you look at
Schödinger's cat. More concretely, there's the gap between
quantum
mechanics and classical gravity, and everyone's general unhappiness with
the empirical nature of the standard model. There's even been hope
from recent research that quantum gravity may be
something we can practically experiment with. (q.v. the Sept. 2000 Scientific
American)

Many of us hope
for new physics. But whether whatever comes
next will produce souls, psionics, time travel or ansibles is
anyone's guess.

"q.v." ("quod vide") means "which see" (not "for which see") -- i.e.
"which you should read". If you just want to tell someone to read
something, you can use plain "v." ("vide"), which means "see".
So you can say, e.g., "V. the article in Scientific American". An
alternative is "cf." ("confer"), "compare".

If you can make
"q.v." stand for "quoque vide" (see also), you'd be OK, but I
don't think that's standard.

Of course, I'm the sort of person who complains when people
say "Author: id." (because "idem" has grammatical gender of
neuter, so I think it should be applied only to works, not authors) -- I would have
everyone write "Author: isd." or "Author: ead." ("isdem", "eadem").

Never mind when
people use "e.g." for "i.e." or "i.e." for "q.v." -- let alone the dreaded "ect.".

Um, I did have some comments on these
actual questions, but I left them in my laptop, so I'll have to try to post them
tomorrow.

The Logo programming language was translated to French
in
the middle '80s to run on the Thomson TO7 computers (Education bought shitloads of them, they were ZX81 with 128 Ko RAM and
Microsoft Basic, my first computer, sniff).

The two kinds of capabilities tries to solve two different problems. The
capability system in linux is build on the formerly posix.1e draft which
got withdrawn (and therefore is available (somewhere)).

Posix capabilities tries to solve the problem with an all-mighty God
(aka. root) and the concept of either being all-mighty or a luser.
Instead of letting you httpd being run by an all-mighty user we only
gives it the capability to connect to ports <1024 (CAP_BIND, I think).
Then the only harm a httpd security hole would have is that you httpd
installation could be (partly) destroyed and the evil cracker coudl
block all you ports.

Implementation details of Posix capabilities is ``just'' replacing all
the if-root-P in the kernel with some does the user have capability 10.

Real capabilities tries to solve a more general problem: Access to
resources of any kind. Instead of controling access to files on the
levels (u)ser, (g)roup and (o)thers, you can control which users that
should have access to you files. This can be implemented by some sort of
unlimited, dynamic and user-controled groups.

But it gets even better. You can control it to the level of processes.
You can give you users rights to read /etc/passwd through login(1) and
passwd(1) but not with any other programs.

Capabilities and persistence is cool. But I don't know anything about
it. But I would like to play around with it, but Eros seems to be on the
kernel-hackers only level.

When I was child I've played whit a danish programing language in school
and the first translation of K&R's C-book the programing examples was
translated (never seen an compiler for that though).

The way you get the results PEAR have is to have a standard
deviation of 7.075 and then claim significance in a score of
+0.028 from chance. It also helps if you ignore the fact that
when the subjects were trying to have no effect they scored +0.015
from random.

On gravitational anomolies: It should be noted that Einstein did
not come up with an equation when he created general
relativity, he came up with an infinite set of equations and
picked the simplest one. There is no reason why the simplest one
should match reality and Einstein himself moved to the next simplest one
when it was pointed out that his model would mean that the universe is
expanding (His cosmological constant mistake). The anomolies with the
simplest equation can all be accounted for by simply choosing a slightly
more complicated equation.

On Schoedinger's cat: I wouldn't pay to much attention to Paul Davies
et al - just because you are a good physicist does not mean
that you are a good philosopher. Trust me on that one, I did a degree
in physics and have heard a lot of very intelligent men sprout a
complete load of gibberish when wandering into philosophy. Whenever you
hear people talk about the philosophy behind quantum mechanics you need
to keep a few things in mind:

With quatum mechanics making an observation imparts an enourmous
amount of energy to what you are observing. So you are never observing
the electron, you always observe the interaction of the electron + the
photon used to observe it. Actually this is true of all experiments,
even classical ones, but with classical mechanics the interaction is so
small relative to what is being observed that this interaction can be
ignored - no so with quantum mechanics.

The question `What happens when we are not observing it?' is
inherently unanswerable.

When people claim that an electron takes every path to the screen
they're talking out of their arses. There are three mathematically
equivalent formulations of quantum mechanics and each one says something
different about what happens between observations. You need to always
keep in mind that these images dreamt up by physicists are just mental
tools used to help them deal with the complicated mathematics. They are
all inherently unverifiable (hence the existence of three different
stories) and therefore do not qualify as science. Treat these stories
as a tool to help you work out what the result is going to be - not as
gospel about what is happening between observations.

Quantum particles are not both waves and particles at the
same time, they are something else entirely that have some properties of
a wave and some properties of a particle. That our mind has trouble
getting a grip on such entitites does not mean that they can't exist.

The other reason I expect that Grope hasn't gone too far is that it is highly dependent
on hacking in some pretty serious instrumentation to GCC, which has, over the last couple of years, seen
some pretty massive rearchitecting. That just plain makes it tough.

PEAR "works" because the guy running the lab really used to be dean of
the engineering departement at Princeton. Somehow got a big grant during
the time that cold war fears made people think this kind of "research"
was important cause the Russians were doing it. Most importantly because
"academic freedom" is being used as an excuse at Princeton
to not "make waves" and do something sensible with crackpots like
this..... IMNHO

are there many (any) programming languages based on natural
languages which are not english?

There was a forth-like programming language on freshmeat a few weeks ago
called Var'aq.
It is based on Klingon, and as a result, should probably be viewed
primarily as an exercise in linguistic creativity...

does digital watermarking work in any reliable way when
you resample a watermarked signal. if so, how?

The answer is: it depends... Digital watermarking, like
steganography, can be applied to many types of contents: still images,
videos, sounds and even plain text. You did not specify which one(s)
you are interested in, but the principles are similar. Resampling is
not really a common practice for plain text (well, that can be
discussed...) so I will focus on images and sounds.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this domain. I'm just playing with
some of these concepts from time to time, but that's it. So don't be
surprised if my explanations are a bit vague or if I do not use the most
appropriate terms when I describe something.

As explained above by darkewolf,
some early attempts at watermarking images were a bit naive and
consisted (for example) in replacing the color of some pixels in an
image by a similar color that looked almost identical to the eye but had
a different index in the color palette (e.g. for GIF). By extracting
some bits from the color index of some pixels in the image, you got a
stream of 1's and 0's that could contain the watermark, including some
kind of standard tag and a CRC to avoid false positives. A similar and
equally naive method of watermarking uncompressed sound files (e.g. WAV)
consisted in changing the least significant bit of some samples so that
you would not hear the difference. Of course, these methods do not
survive any kind of resampling or even most lossless conversions to
other file formats. I doubt that any of the current products is still
using such a poor method for watermarking.

Most of the current methods of watermarking are based on small
changes in the coefficients of a decomposition of the signal in
frequencies (like a Fourier transform or the DCT representation for JPEG
images). For images, this is done in the spatial domain and for sound
files this is done in the temporal domain. By applying some small
changes to some coefficients, you can embed a watermark in an image or a
sound file, even if they are compressed.

These methods can survive some kinds of resampling. For example,
the low frequencies averaged over large blocks of the image or sound
will be almost unaffected if someone takes every second pixel of the
image or if they resample the sound at half of the original sampling
rate. The watermark will still be there because it is spread all over
the image or sound. On the other hand, if you hide your watermark in
the medium frequencies and repeat it several times in smaller blocks of
the image, then all copies would probably be destroyed by the previous
resampling but would be preserved if someone crops the image (without
rescaling it). The same applies to sound files if only a part of the
sound is extracted: as long as this part contains at least one full
block, you will be able to detect the watermark. I think that the
current watermarking products are using a combination of both:
modifications of the medium and low frequencies computed over small and
large blocks, in order to survive most of the simple transformations
that could be applied to the protected contents.

There is always a tradeoff between the robustness of the watermark
and the quality of the results when compared to the original contents,
but I think that some methods can be fairly resistant.

schoen, thanks for the correction, I
think. I was trying to say "see also" which I thought was ok for q.v. I
didn't follow your explaination of how "quod vide" differs from
that.

But I'm all for proper usage and appreciate the correction.

Schrödinger's Cat

mettw, I was referring metaphorically to
classical-quantum correspondence, measurement theory and what's
generally referred to as "wave function collapse" in undergraduate
physics courses. I've never heard a convincing explanation of how the
quantum laws for probability distributions reduce to deterministic
classical physics as &hbar; goes to zero. Nor have I heard a convincing
argument that the question doesn't mean anything.

Everything you say is true, but I don't think the Copenhagen
Interpretation ("we're not going to worry about it") is the end of the
road. There certainly has been a lot of philosophical nonsense around
QM, but that doesn't mean we can't invent pictures to guide us. Surely
you've heard the scaffolding argument? We need those
little stories to get to the point where we can write the equations, and
to help us understand what they mean, the way an arch needs external
support until all the stones are in place. This is the part of reasoning
that Penrose is arguing about, and I don't think we understand it very
well.

I agree with you on scaffolding. This is what the pyschologist Hans
Eysenk called a weak theory. It's weak in the sense that it's
completely unverifiable because it doesn't really make any falsifiable
predictions - The use of a weak theory being that it guides research
into areas that it may not otherwise have gone.

But I don't think all of this talk about multiple universes and so on
even qualifies as a weak theory. With a weak theory in psychology there
is a hope that it will eventually be replaced by a strong theory, but I
don't see that in the QM interpretations. Because of the interaction
problem you can't make an observation between the end points without
changing the experiment entirely. This means that the qustion of what
happens between experiments is unanswerable, and is therefore not even a
logical question.

What happens with the shift from QM -> classical is that the degree to
which we can ignore the interaction between the object and our
observation aparatus increases untill, around the chemistry level, we
can for all practical purposes pretend that there is no interaction at
all.

This is all a question of what we can know. With QM you can't
know what is happening between the end points because you change the
experiment if you try. Infact you can't even properly distinguish
between an electron and a photon because we are observing the
interection between the two, not each individually. So you shouldn't see
the wavefunction collapse as a
real phenomenon as there is inherently no way to verify a wave
function collapse over a lagrangian path integral over a quantum leap
over strings over ... These just aren't scientific questions, so we are
forced to resign ourselves to fact that with quantum mechanics we only
have a statistical theory and our conceptualisations of what is
happening are usefull, but unscientific. Indeed, a question that can
not be answered is not even a logical question.

I missed your question about how a probabilistic theory goes to a
deterministic theory. This is akin to thermodynamics, in that there is
an extreemely small chance that all of the oxygen in the room will
suddenly shift to one side and I'll suffocate. But the chance of this
happening is so small that I can say that it will never happen.

Likewise, the probability that an electron will make a macro sized jump
is so small that you can assume that it will never happen. Therefore,
as you move into the macro world the random behaviour of quantum
particles becomes relatively smaller and smaller untill you can ignore
it completely. At the macro level the random behaviour of the quantum
particles is so small that it has, usually, no observable effect.

Quod
means "which"
(there's another
quod
which means "because"). The word for "also" would be
quoque.

Since "quod" can't be "also", "q.v." can't be "see also".

Now, the unasked question here is why we can't make up our own Latin
acronyms. I've done that, but we have a problem when an acronym has
a long-established expansion (at least since medieval times, in the
case of scholarly/critical Latin) -- much in the same sense that people
don't usually name their own programs "ls" or "cat", even though you
could and Unix would let you.

In connexion with graydon's question about the Princeton
Engineering Anomalies work...

It appears that there's nothing in quantum mechanix^Hcs that
contradicts perfect foresight -- as long as you can't do
anything about it. Dreaming that an airliner will crash, and not
getting on and thereby surviving, is fine. If it were a
specific problem you could call and warn about, you won't,
because then there's no "loud" future event to propagate back.

This ties in nicely to fatalistic Greek traditions. Cassandra
can't foresee anything about anybody who will pay her the
slightest attention, but everybody who ignores her is an open
book.

POSIX "capabilities" are not capabilities
at all. In fact they used to be called privileges, which is a
much better word to describe them, since they represent in effect
"temporary permission to break the rules" (i.e. special privileges).
It is extremely unfortunate that the POSIX people chose to co-opt
this established and meaningful term, dooming the security community
to everlasting confusion about perhaps the most important concept
in security of all!

True capabilities, as in EROS, form a pure object-oriented
security model that is at once simpler, more efficient, and more
provably
secure (precisely because it is simpler!) than the messy
ACL (access-control list) style security models you see in place more
commonly.

An ACL presumes that the designer of the system can foretell
in advance all of the distinctions of authority that users will ever
want to
make, and can encode it in a fixed set of permission bits. It is hence
doomed
to failure: when you want to give away just a little authority, you are
forced
to give it away in huge chunks. Take, for instance, Unix: you cannot
give a
program just the capability to manipulate a particular file; rather, you
must
run it will the full authority of your userid, with which it can do
untold damage.

In a capability system, you wouldn't hand the program the authority
to
be you; you would simply hand it the capability to write just
the
file you wanted it to write. Since these capabilities are implemented
as
object behaviours, this amounts to nothing more than handing the program
an object reference. Further, there is no need for some sort of
security manager
to intervene and check the requested operation against a list of
permitted
operations (i.e. what Unix does), which is slow and error-prone; the
possession
of the object reference itself denotes the ability to perform the
operation.
Auditing a piece of code for its security properties is then just a
matter of
examining variable scope to see where object references are in scope and
where they are passed.

That's the reason lots of experiments are considered only valid
if done double blind. If you're writing down the output of an RNG
you're likely to make a mistake every now and then, just by chance.
If you're expecting the output to have more odd numbers than even,
the mistakes may tend to favor odds.

Just a little something you might find interesting: there are legends
that the postal offices in the east European countries used to re-word
suspicios messages, specifically to make steganography impossible (or
very hard).

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